Welcome to Adam Kraus's random mixing of essays, commentary, and humor, all presented in a blog format. Hopefully you will find it interesting.

6.06.2004

Blatantly Creepy Lurking

Don't ask me how I found this guy from Yale's blog site. I don't have any friends from Yale, and the people I do know who go there I don't particularly like. I have no idea what series of links brought me to this random kid's site, but I would bet that if you mapped out and then traced the links geographically according to IP location, you would travel the circumference of the earth approximately seven times. So anyway, in the vain of being an anonymous cyber-lurker, I am going to quote and link to a post written by a kid I don't know.

There's a reason I'm going to do this. I think this post has something to contribute to the gay marriage debate. According to this guy's friend who's stationed in Iraq, the incidence of male homosexuality in Iraqi society is amazingly high. In the inimitable words of my stranger friend:

I have reached the tentative conclusion that in male-dominated societies where women are treated as subhuman, homosexuality is much more acceptable, or maybe unacceptable but is more common. The men feel bad about having sex with women, so it's much more acceptable to have sex with someone who is worthy, another man. Ancient Greece fits this theory, as (seemingly) do Muslim dominated countries.

I'm not going to link to the post because this guy's friend also happens to be somewhat of an amateur telescopic-lens photographer, and some of the pictures he's taken to help visually corroborate his observation are rather unsightly. I will link to the main page, where you can read the text-only version of the post.

Now I'm not going to treat this guy's theorizing as gospel or anything, and I don't think I agree with the contention that in male-dominated societies "men feel bad about having sex with women" because they are less worthy, but I think there may be insight in the observation that homosexuality is more common in patriarchal, oppressive societies. It may have something to do with the natural human tendency to rebel against authority. If a society is based on a strict code of masculine behavior and scorns anything unmasculine, people are naturally going to want to rebel and do things that are less masculine. It's like how in Europe, where the drinking age is much lower, kids drink, but juvenile alcohol abuse is not nearly as widespread as it is in the states, where underage drinking prohibition is much more strictly enforced.

This observation seems to at least call into question the argument that if we condone homosexuality by instituting gay marriage, tacitly accepting it in our religious institutions etc., there are going to be more homosexuals in the future.